← What Really Matters with Walter Russell Mead
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- [00:06]
A
Hey, everyone. Jeremy here from what really Matters. Walter and I are on the road this week and can't record a new episode till next week. So until then, please enjoy this recent talk that Walter gave at the London School of Economics on American foreign policy in the Age of Trump. The lecture was from a few months ago, so predates some recent news, but it's still very relevant in Evergreen. Hope you enjoy it and see you next week.
- [00:35]
B
Good evening. Great to have everybody here. My name is Peter Trubowitz. I'm a professor in the International Relations Department. I'm the director of the Phelan United States center which is hosting this evening's event. Tonight's lecture is the fourth in our year long series entitled America's Changing Role in the World. And the series is basically premised on the idea that the United States is having something of a rethink about its foreign policy purposes, its priorities, which arguably began before Donald Trump's presidency, but in many ways, of course, has accelerated on his watch, especially in Trump 2.0. We very much wanted as part of this series to bring speakers in who have views, different views on the Trump administration, what it's trying to accomplish, what it will mean for the United States and given America's outsized power, what it will mean for the rest of the world. And I'm very pleased to welcome tonight's speaker, Walter Russell Mead, to give us his take on the direction of travel in, as he puts it, the Age of Trump. Walter is the Ravenel B. Currie Distinguished Fellow in Strategy and Statesmanship at the Hudson Institute. He's the Alexander Hamilton professor of Strategy and Statecraft at the Hamilton center for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida. And he is a columnist, a very well known columnist. I think probably everybody in the room knows this at the Wall Street Journal. He's also the author of a number of well known books including God and Britain, America and the Making of the modern world. That's 2008. Paul Power, terror, peace and War. America's Grand Strategy in a World at risk in 2004 and a favorite on many foreign policy, US foreign policy reading lists, Special Providence, American Foreign Policy and How it Changed the World. And that was published in 2001. Walter, it's great to have you here. So here's the game plan for tonight. Walter's gonna share some initial thoughts about American foreign policy in the Trump era. Then we're going to turn to discussion and then I will open it up to take questions from the floor and online from the many people online for those of you online, you can submit your questions. The way to do it is via the Q and A function feature at the bottom of your screen. Please be sure to include your name and affiliation. For those of you in the theater, just raise your hand and the ushers will find you. Once I call on you, if you haven't already, please put your phone on silent because this is being recorded and will be available, I guess as of Tomorrow on YouTube somewhere. So with that, please join me in giving Walter a very warm LSE Welco welcome.
- [04:19]
C
Thank you. Well, thank you for that introduction and the opportunity to share some time with you. I also just like to thank the powers that be for welcoming me to London with one of your traditional cold winter rains. Really felt great getting off the plane last night and oh my goodness, they're still doing it here. Some things don't change. In thinking about how I could best use our time together tonight, I think it is probably the most useful thing to do is to talk a little bit about what are some things we need to do in order to be able to analyze, understand, perhaps cope with the Trump presidency, the Trump foreign policy. Because what I think I find at least is that in my own mind and many of our colleagues, it is so easy to be sort of overthrown by emotion or surprise or laughter or fear or all kinds of other emotions that Trump's extremely dramatic method of presenting what is also in many ways a very dramatic foreign policy causes somehow to try to keep our head in this, to develop a strong analytical perspective. That's what I do. And I'm here, certainly not as an advocate for the administration or for the course of foreign policy that they're choosing. But as someone who spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the heck is going on, I'm going to share some of the ideas that have helped me understand it. And then in Q and A, I'm happy to get into any kind of specific questions you might have about particular policies or really anything that's on your mind. So I came up with sort of five things to keep in mind when we're trying to respond to and understand the foreign policy of Donald Trump. The first thing to keep in mind, I believe, is that he actually is the first genuinely post modern president. What I mean by this was he's come to office at a time when the world is in disarray in more ways than it's easy for any of us to keep in our minds at any given moment. The information revolution, which is far more sweeping, far more Tumultuous, faster, stronger, more, all encompassing, more challenging of basic social, political and economic, economic relations even than the Industrial Revolution was, is moving into something like maybe it's full phase with AI, or maybe there are many different steps to go. But in any case, every firm, every profession, every country, every religious organization, every civic group is finding that it is operating in completely new and strange terrain. The rules are changing. And yet at the same time, many of us think, well, we can be going through this enormous, tumultuous revolution, but the G7 will go on being what it's been forever. The World Trade Organization will continue, that international life will somehow keep moving in predictable ways, predictable forms and patterns. That's not a rational belief. When we look at what changed in the Industrial Revolution, the numbers of revolutions, political revolutions there were in so many countries, the rise of forces ranging from the sort of French Revolution and the Jacobins to British Mancunian liberalism to fascism and communism and all kinds of movements, huge revolutions of peoples, the rise and fall of immense international empires, all in an extremely compressed period of time. The most violent wars in the history of humanity, unbelievable episodes of destructive ethnic cleansing, resettlement throughout the Balkans and much of the rest of Europe. All of these things happening on an extraordinary timescale. We know in our heads that the information revolution is likely to be a bigger deal than the Industrial Revolution was. But we don't sort of really. We're not very comfortable thinking about what that might mean for the way international politics works. But I think increasingly we're going to be in a world in which national governments feel incredibly challenged by events at home. Their political standing is shaky, they feel they're on thin ice. All the sort of institutions that are bolstering them are in various forms of crisis, decay or transformational change. So they have less flexibility to deal with other countries and work for international solutions, even at a time when international life demands greater international cooperation to solve problems. Trump is a man of this era, and we can. Many of us thought that the world had reached a kind of a plateau of stability. Some in the audience, I think, are probably even too young now to remember the halcyon days, which for many of us older folks is what we took for granted. And this idea was that after 1945 and the terrible upheavals, the world had reached a kind of stable plateau, and that the prosperous mass consumption, mass production, industrial societies of the Western industrial democracies were the end of history, as that was where everything was headed to. And the future would see other countries in other parts of the world becoming more like Denmark. And that in the end we would all be living in very similar countries, very similar styles. And that was where we were headed. And that was kind of the definition of progress. And the belief in this I think we can speak of as modernity. Right. But what it really was, I think, was that after the tumult of the Industrial Revolution, we reached a stage of, call it late stage industrial society, or a mature industrial society, where we had learned to, as peoples, we had learned to use the resources that the Industrial Revolution created to address, if not always to solve the problems that it caused. And the feeling was that this wonderful stability would just keep on going forever. Every year we'd have a little bit more money in our pockets, slightly shorter work weeks, slightly better televisions, you know, smooth progress moving forward along clear lines.
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B
Right?
- [11:56]
C
That's not our world. Our world is something much scarier, much more exciting, potentially much more fruitful. But Donald Trump is, is, has come to power at a time when this is no longer where the world is going. And he no longer, he is the first American president who doesn't see the sort of conservation of the stability of late industrial society and the late industrial geopolitical order as the natural and obvious goal of statecraft. He just doesn't see it. I can't tell you where we're going or how it's going to work out. I think nobody can know, just as nobody in 1820 could have told you what the next hundred years or 150 years would bring in world history. But we are now in an uncharted world with a man who doesn't believe in charts. And this may be the first thing that will help us get a grip on the phenomenon that is Donald Trump. The second thing thought that I keep from that, I'd like to shift to some things that we should keep in mind to better understand him on a day to day basis. This is background. The first, the first rule for understanding Trump in my view, is don't pay attention to the speeches or don't pay too much attention to the speeches. Trump does not speak in order to convey information to his hearers. Right? He actually, you can read about this in, in the book the Art of the Deal. He says that really what you try to do is you actually don't want to give the other person, other party in a bargaining situation. You don't want them to know what you think. You want to keep them in suspense because that will improve your chances of a good deal. So you'll sort of Say things and then you'll see how they react. And that will tell you whether or not to keep going in this direction. It will tell you something about what they think. You're trying to get information from them without them getting information from you. And you see, there's a classic Trump pattern. He'll say to people ranging from domestic politics to international partners, I can be your worst nightmare. I can put hundred percent tariffs on you and I can do this and I can do that, or I can be the best friend you ever had and give you milk and honey in abundance. All right? And then you watch them. How terrified are they of your threats and how eager are they at your promises? And you say, sort of, okay, now help me decide which of these two things I should do. So you start to elicit offers and counter proposals, and that's your bargaining thing. At the same time, and this would be rule two is he does not necessarily. He does not pursue a single strategy. He talks about, he writes about this, or his ghostwriter wrote about this in the Art of the Deal, where he'll pursue many negotiations at the same time. And then some of them seem to be working, so he keeps working. Those others, he's hitting a stone wall. So he walks away from them. So it's very much an opportunistic, pragmatic thing. So he talks about annexing Greenland and the financial markets dive and the Europeans scream even more than they usually scream. All right. And the Republican senators in Congress are starting to get really annoyed. Okay, well, all right, let's, you know, let's get back to the Board of Peace. You know, this is the way he operated as a real estate developer. It's the way he wants to operate as President of the United States. So you constantly find many of my colleagues in journalism and I think sometimes people in foreign ministries and so on, parsing the latest speech of Donald Trump, looking for like, subtle nuances of meaning or trying to decipher the real clue in the text. That's not how you figure this out. Rule 3, we often forget that for Trump, the source of his power is not policy achievement per se, it's drama. That is to say, Trump has understood and weaponized something about our early information age society, the role of social media and media generally in that society. And he has figured out, in a sense, how to turn, how to convert eyeballs into power. If you think about it, ever since he came down that escalator in 2015, the golden escalator in the Trump Tower in New York to launch his career in politics, he has commanded enormous amounts of free media in the United States and increasingly in the rest of the world, where now everywhere you go in the world, what do people talk about? Trump. Trump. Trump. Trump. Trump. Trump. Trump. No human being in the history of our species, no living human being has commanded the share of the mental bandwidth of the human species as Donald Trump has. And he thinks a lot about that. All right? It isn't just something that happened by accident. And he believes that. That, you know, the old saying, all public, you know, there's no such thing as bad publicity. He believes this. That is, you know, what the fatal thing for Trump would be if he started to bore us, right? So he won't. And this, this can make confusion, confuse people in terms of his. His political goals and activities. So, you know, very often he sort of will keep fighting for some lost cause, even if it's costing him politically or, you know, he'll kind of spoil a victory in some way. Right. He's not aiming to achieve, like, okay, I've gotten a great new status quo, I'm 80% in the polls and everything is good. And I'm just going to put that. Put it on cruise, right? Automatic cruise control and move forward. No, he feels that if there isn't surprise, there isn't drama. Will Trump destroy himself this time, or will he find a way out of it, or whatever it might be, right. That he loses his grip on the public mind and that weakens his hold on power. So he will often do things both in foreign and domestic politics in a way that is not about, you know, not about the ostensible policy goals, but about the drama. The drama is the point, much less, in many cases, than the policy objective. And you will, I think you will not understand what Trump is trying to do with or what he might not be able. You might not be able to predict at all what he'll do next. He's never gonna be completely predictable, but you can at least be less surprised if you hold this in mind. I think also something that people don't get outside the, you know, maybe outside his close inner circle is how much time he spends on. Actually, before I get to that rule, there's something else I wanna say about drama and Rule three. This is how he cast his Cabinet. He cast his Cabinet. He didn't staff his Cabinet. That is, he looked for people who would be entertaining in some way. So great respect, as I'm sure we all have, for the Director of National Intelligence, for the head of the FBI and many of his Other appointments. Awesome. I think, right. What he was doing was not picking the bureaucrat who could provide the most stable, orderly leadership in a Cabinet office. He was looking for somebody who would make exciting tv. Right. So will Pete Hegseth get fired because of X actually is better for Trump's program than will this boring Pentagon bureaucrat beavering it away at a mission accomplish objective Q in reform of the Pentagon's purchasing? He is not a policy wonk. He's a drama queen. It's a very different approach to life. And again, he's made it work. Right. Again, you might say, well, what about his policies? They're terrible. Well, again, he wasn't trying to make policy. He was trying to make drama. And he has succeeded brilliantly in a way that no human being has ever done before. So what else? Coalition management is the fourth point in trying to understand Donald Trump. He spends a lot more time than we think, typically in trying to hold his MAGA tech coalition together. You can look, for example, we now see, and I think we're going to see more of this as he approaches the end of his second term. You see a group in the Magaverse, the MAGA universe who want to sort of take control of the MAGA brand from Trump. Think of someone like a Tucker Carlson or, or some of these other Internet and media personalities that are trying to assert their own claim to be Mr. Or Ms. Maga. Trump does not want that to happen. He wants to marginalize those folks without losing their supporters. He's in a struggle to control the party he is trying to keep. We all see, I think that, you know, in a sense, we think of Vance maybe as the left hand of the Trump administration. And Rubio is the, you know, Rubio is the good cop, Vance is the bad cop. Certainly that was what we saw from the last two years at the Munich Security Conference. But in some ways, this is about Rubio as kind of his ambassador to the old Republican establishment. Centrists, bankers, other countries. Vance is the ambassador to MAGA world. And so it's Vance's job, in a sense, to keep, to sort of sound radical enough so that Tucker Carlson can't pull the rug out from under Trump on the MAGA side. And it's Rubio's job to sort of keep things operating over there. Meanwhile, Donald Trump wants to control the succession as he gets closer to that second term. The question is, who's going to follow Donald Trump? My sense is, first of all, he doesn't want this to end, but I think he's resigned to the reality that he gets two terms. But he would like to manage the struggle over his succession the way Queen Elizabeth I managed the struggle over hers, which is not to tell anybody who it is until you're on your deathbed and then in your last gasp, you allegedly say, it's going to be James of Scotland. All right, Allegedly. That's what someone apparently who had been receiving large subsidies from James of Scotland said. She said, and why wouldn't we believe that? But in any case, Trump wants, you know, if it looks, if Vance starts getting too big for his britches and is strutting around like I am, you know, I'm the natural heir. Trump will, you know, push Vance down and push Rubio up or someone else up. He wants them dancing attendance on him all the time. But that's as partly natural egotism, which Trump is in no way short of. But it's also, it's smart coalition politics. Trump is the umpire between the wings of the coalition, and they all look to him line in the Psalms, you know, as the eyes of all wait upon the O Lord, and thou give us them their meat in due season. Right. That's the. That's the attitude that Trump wants the people around him to approach him with. Feast or famine, the president decides, right. And so he will make, I think, at times, foreign policy decisions that may not make sense or much sense in the realm of foreign policy, but make a lot of sense in the realm of domestic politics and coalition management. This is not unique to Donald Trump by any means. All political leaders, whether they're in authoritarian or democratic or even totalitarian systems, have to kind of think through the relationship of their international problems and their domestic problems and figure out what's the best path through it. So Trump is not exceptional in that way. It's just, I think it's hard for us. He's so dramatic, and, you know, the stunning impact of the drama and the decisiveness, we don't think about the work that goes on behind the scenes. So I suppose in some ways we can think of Trump as a little bit of a Napoleonic figure, and that is, he's somebody who. And I don't think he's going to leave something, the equivalent of the Code Napoleon or something of that kind. But who knows? Still has three more years to run, and a week of Trump time is like six months of normal time. So that means on the Trump clock, we've got 30 years. You know, that's the pace of events these days. But his talent for weaponizing or instrumentalizing Eyeball power into political power, and then using that to harness the still unmatched military and economic instruments of power that the United States has, all in the service of this project, and then using that power to elevate his dramatic power. I was at the World Economic Forum in Davos, what was it, about a month ago? So I was there when he made his speech about Greenland. And what you saw was everyone in the room, these are CEOs, these are foreign ministers, these are bankers, these are people who could buy and sell, probably everybody in this room and this building many times over, right? And they're all crowding, trying to get into the room where Trump is speaking, because Trump has constructed this situation. Threats against Greenland. Is he going to announce that the US Military is invading Greenland? Is he going to destroy NATO? Will the entire world we know be completely destroyed in the next hour? It depends on Donald Trump. And they all have to be in the room to hear him say that they can't help themselves. Right? That's Trump's power at work. Now, we should note he did not get Greenland. It's not absolute. Doesn't mean that whatever idea comes into his head launches into reality. But I have never seen a world leader of any kind demonstrate the kind of power of over his peers that Donald Trump did at Davos this year. You make a lot of arguments about is this good for the United States in the long term? You know, many things can be said about that, but simply as a display of what he wanted it to be, it was extraordinary. It was historic. In his own way, this was Trump's equivalent of Napoleon at Austerlitz. Maybe in Britain, people still teach things like Austerlitz. I don't know. So I will leave you then. My kind of fifth point thing to keep in mind about Trump is just a quick look at where he sees the world and what he's thinking about. As far as I can tell, again, more from his actions than his speeches, I think he thinks that one of his biggest problems, one of America's biggest problems as well, is that our key alliances of the Cold War were falling into disrepair. That Europe and Japan had gotten so accustomed to, to having a free ride in the American alliance system, that they had utterly neglected not only their own defense spending, but at a more profound level, their political class, their political culture, had lost the concept of strategy, that, you know, they honestly thought that writing a letter to the World Court was the same thing as doing something or accomplishing something, that they worked, that they no longer had the capability or were losing their remaining capability to act effectively in the world. And that, that is a problem for the United States. And you can. So he wanted, you know, sort of, you can call it tough love. I'm not sure how much love was there, but toughness wake him up, tell him party's over. And I think that's what he's been doing. And oddly, it seems to me, even though I don't think any American president has been as unpopular as Donald Trump is right now, although early Reagan came close in Europe and LBJ was not particularly beloved in Europe either, I think that, you know, Europe is now moving towards spending 5% of GDP on defense. In Japan, they've elected, with the biggest landslide victory Since World War II, a leader who is committed to building Japan up in defense. So there is a sense in which, even though inter allied relations are not particularly strong at the moment, and that's a very euphemistic way of describing it, the basis of the alliance may be turning from steady deterioration year by year by year, accumulating with interest to something different. Trump will not be around to try to manage a U.S. relationship with an invigorated Europe or Japan. But that is actually, for an American president, a better problem than a problem of trying to deal with an inert and dying Japan and Europe, at least strategically. Strategically dying. And Russia, the role of Russia in its thinking. That would be the last thing I'll mention, and that is that I think a big difference between the way Trump looks at Eurasia and at world politics and the way many of his critics do, is that for Trump, having a strong Russia, even if it's not a very nice Russia, is better for the United States than having a weak Russia. And the reason is that if you had a kind of a weak or disunited or collapsing Russia, this would be wonderful for China. If your core concern is a balance of power that would keep China from attacking Taiwan and otherwise sort of launching big international conflicts. You need a strong Russia, even if it isn't very nice and even if it's being mean to you or your friends about something. He also would not want the war between Russia and Ukraine to end as a frozen conflict where, you know, we keep investment out of Russia, we continue to boycott Russia. He really doesn't want that. He doesn't care at all about things like the inviolability of frontiers. He doesn't believe in, you know, that international law is what saves us from war. He actually sort of thinks power is what gives international law its force. And without power, there is no force, there is no law. So from that perspective, he genuinely is looking for some kind of a deal with Russia to end Ukraine and is willing to make concessions that a lot of other people really, including me, would rather not. But that's how he sees it and that's how he keeps coming back to it. At the same time, he knows that Putin isn't interested in making that deal yet. And if you look carefully, I think you can see Trump ratcheting the pressure up on Russia. But again, it is with this kind of a compromise peace in mind, rather than some kind of a sort of glorious restoration of pre war Ukraine. Anyway, those are some thoughts and I'll be very interested in your questions and comments.
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B
Great, Walter, that was terrific. You covered a lot of ground. I think I would like to maybe just begin by picking up on the comments you made about Trump's domestic coalition and managing the coalition. So one part of the coalition that you didn't talk about, I know you've written about, is big tech. And I'm wondering if you could say a few words about how that fits into the Trump story that you're weaving or telling here. And I think it's especially important here because big tech, or at least most of big tech, are the oligarchs and the barons, you know, were aligned with the Democratic Party going back. It was Bill Clinton that initially courted them. So in the 90s, they aligned with the Democratic Party. And it is really 2024 when, I mean, there's exceptions before at Palantir, but moved earlier. But in general, the switch, the realignment occurs in 2024. And so there's a number of things here that maybe just your understanding or the way you see Trump reaching out to a bloc that basically has interests that are, at least on the face of the cards, diametrically opposed to, let's say, Bannon esque American firsters. And you know, Bannon refers to them as techno feudalists. But with respect to immigration for high skilled workers, clearly with respect to China. So can you say a little bit about that, about that part of the story? It strikes me as significant in that part of the question is whether or not they're in with the Republicans going forward.
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C
Yeah. Now I agree this is a big issue and I don't think that this game is over. But and you're right that the big tech folks by and large came to Trump's support in 2024 in a way they hadn't in 2020 or 2016. What's going on there? Part of It, I think, is, you know, the normal thing. I mean, you know, if you're a company that does a lot of business with the United States government, you would like to be on good terms with the President of the United States. And Trump makes absolutely no secret that he, the French politician, once said, for my friends, everything, for my enemies, the law. And that Trump definitely comes from that school of politics. And I'm saying this as nicely as I know how to say it. Okay, there's definitely that, but that would have been true in 2016 or 2020 as well. Some big things are happening in the world of tech. One is that if we go back to the 1990s, and for some of this, this means going back in our mental memories. And for some of you, I'm talking about the great unknown, distant past. But all of us, sort of the conventional wisdom then was we were in a post national age and increased, there would be, you know, corporations weren't citizens of a country and you know, they were citizens of the world and so on and so forth. And tech companies were the most post national of all companies. You know, they didn't, Google didn't operate with boundaries and flags and all they wanted to do was just their search engine everywhere, et cetera. Well, today tech is the center of international competition that is many people, and especially this is how folks in Silicon Valley look at it, would say the whole key to any US China competition is that if either side gets a decisive win in the world of AI and related tech, this is not just an AI thing, that side wins. And so the chief goal of national policy from this point of view should be to make sure that our side wins the battle to develop and deploy the resources of tech, military, civilian, the whole range of things. And conveniently for them, this also means that the chief business of government is to make my company rich and successful. But that never hurts, right? And so they. But the question that immediately comes to your mind is how do we do this? Because in China, Xi Jinping can just tell people to do things. It's not that easy for Xi Jinping. He has limits too. But it's a lot easier for China to just say, okay, we're all going to do X and a lot of people end up doing X. But in the United States and other Western societies, people have to be persuaded. And AI is a scary technology. You know, things like autonomous vehicles, you see more Waymo taxis on the street every day. That doesn't make you feel good if you're a delivery driver or a cab driver. Or lots of other things. So how are you going to find the votes for a candidate for a government that is going to keep pushing AI even if there's a lot of popular resistance to it? And I think for some of these tech Hamiltonians, as I'm calling them, they see first of all in a politician like Trump who has the ability to, my grandmother used to talk about somebody who could sell shoes to a snake that, you know, Trump has that kind of uncanny persuasive ability. So he's a great advocate and he knows how to do the theater. But they also, they look at their economic interests and they're different from the traditional Republican industrial interests or even financial interests. So for a company like General Electric or General Motors Manufacturing, global manufacturing companies, free trade is the core of their business model. For more than 30 years, they have been investing in global networks of production, buying and making in the cheapest markets and then selling in the best markets. That's who they are, that's what they do. You attack free trade, you are attacking the holy of holies, the citadel.
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B
Right.
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C
If you're making AI, you don't import or export. That many things free trade is, you may, you know, as someone who's had an economics education, you may think that in most cases, free trade is the most efficient way for an economy to run. But maximizing free trade has very little short term bearing on the things that, that you care about. So if the people are anti globalization, you can throw that baby off the sled to feed to the wolves, Right? The same thing. A lot of traditional business Republicans in the US have been pretty suspicious of private sector labor unions. Drive up wages, drive up costs. Well, again, it's not gonna be the labor unions that get OpenAI into economic trouble. They just don't care. And so here again, and you can see in the kind of J.D. vance wing of the MAGA movement, there are a lot of people who sound almost like Truman Democrats when it comes to the working man and so on. When you talk about immigration, yeah, H1B, which is our sort of high tech form of immigration, that they care about this, but the numbers are not that great. And if you're a rich tech company, you can pay $100,000 for a visa, especially if it's for somebody who you really want. I mean, you're giving them stock options. So $100,000 in cash is not that big of a deal. So they can work with that, but they do not need a mass of low skill immigrants. Now, if you're a construction company or you are a fast food franchise or a hotel and entertainment company, you need cheap labor, right? But if you're Google, Alphabet and immigration were to stop and Trump were to deport every last undocumented person in the United States, all right, your janitorial bill would go up your 30%, your landscaping bill would go up 30% and you wouldn't even notice those on your annual report. So this new tech financial group has a different vision of their business interests and they see these as at least potentially better aligned with some of the elements in MAGA populism than the classic Better Business Bureau Chamber of Commerce Republican agenda would be. And I think, and so they see the possibility of an arrangement, I mean, just to.
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B
So I hear you on that. At the same time, you can see when you look at opinion polls that there's a lot of opposition to AI within the Republican Party as well as in the Democratic Party. So and for different reasons it seems to me, you know, so there's a lot of opposition to data centers in the Republican Party. There's a lot of opposition or concerned about privacy inside the Republican Party and stuff that's going to be, you know, kind of available to their kids. And the effort by the administration to say there has to be a national party policy, there can't be state level policy policies. So it kind of seems to me this is, we're a ways from foreign policy here, but just maybe to get your thoughts on this, that there's going to be a race politically inside both the Democratic and the Republican Party.
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C
Well, I will tell you, the day very soon after I published this article, a very senior Democratic figure who is perhaps running for president called me to talk about it. So it's, you know, it's very much there.
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B
Right.
- [46:36]
C
And you, you know, you can imagine how Democrats might try to work this thing agenda. But again, for, for why the maga, the, the tech lords right now are working with Trump. I think what, what they see is a lot of these things like data center locators locations and you can sort of manage those in politics is a dirty business and Nothing is ever 100% solution. You give here, you take there. But I think they're also looking at potentially a kind of a class war dynamic that you read what some of the tech people say and they actually say that most of the jobs that are vulnerable to AI, at least in these next stages, are the white collar jobs. What is a bureaucracy? A bureaucracy is a very primitive form of AI which uses human beings instead of silicon chips to apply algorithms to data bureaucracies take a bunch of data, the facts of something on the ground, an algorithm of law precedent and so on and out of that they get to decisions they're not supposed to be creative. Two different bureaucrats reviewing the same case in the same agency. They in theory should come to the same conclusion about it. In fact, if that doesn't happen very often, the rule of law starts falling apart. So the sort of a lot of the educated elite professions are probably more vulnerable in coming years to this than the blue the plumbers may be some of the last to lose jobs. Who knows whether any of this will happen. Anyway, this is all speculation, but that's our life in an early stage information society. We're guessing about things that will happen. But so you might well think that the maga, the anti elitism of the MAGA people could be like, yeah, let's get those bureaucrats, those entitled know it all bureaucrats who think they're better than you. Right, let's get them that that may allow and again, probably from the standpoint of the adaptation of AI and so on, these functions may be more important, may yield more benefit than later on the plumbing robots or whatever may come. So I think I don't know that it's going to work. And some of that depends on who does it. You can see that people like J.D. vance are aware of this, of the tension in that coalition and the need, need to try to build that coalition. It's a seam, it's not an automatic thing. It may fall apart. But it looks to me like there are a lot of people who would like to try to stitch it together.
- [49:42]
B
Let's go from big tech to nuclear weapons. So tacking back to your comments about that, Trump has gotten the Western allies to invest in military spending and Japan is moving and Germany and so forth. One of the, I think most striking developments over the past year has been the move or the push among America's allies to the concern that they have about America's nuclear umbrella and the reliability. I mean we've got Germany's Chancellor Mertz is in talks with Paris about the possibility of some kind of extended French deterrent that's following on Poland and the Baltic states already having the those conversations with France, South Korea, Japan. There's talk there about granted it's very, let's say, especially in the case of Japan, preliminary about developing an independent nuclear capability. But I think this is a really striking development and it's not the first time that America's nuclear deterrent or umbrella has Been, you know, question, the French have been banging on this as, you know, since the 1950s. But, you know, I had a prominent businessman in the city just the other day say to me, you know, damn it, I think the French were right that you can't count on the United States. And so I think the question, of
- [51:41]
C
course, you could always count on France.
- [51:43]
B
Indeed. So I think it just kind of goes to show where things, things are right now. Right. So I think, you know, I mean, this strikes me as in some ways qualitatively different than that earlier kind of discussion where the, you know, where the French were like worried about whether or not American president would trade New York for Paris. This is about whether or not the United States will uphold the network of alliances that it created.
- [52:21]
C
Welcome to the postmodern world where institutions that we've assumed were fundamental for decades may not have the staying power that we would like them to or that we thought they did. And I do, you know, Trump actually in 2016 did say that, actually. So the Japanese get nukes, the Koreans get nukes, the Taiwanese get nukes, and we go home. What's wrong with that? I do think that, you know, there is a, that for liberal internationalists, nuclear weapons are not only a problem because they kill a lot of people and create a lot of danger, which they do. And liberal internationalists worry about this as much as anybody else and for as good a reason, but also that essentially a nuclear deterrent exempt states from international law, making them do things they really
- [53:18]
D
don't want to do.
- [53:20]
C
That if you imagine a country where a world where 200 countries had nuclear weapons, international law would be a smaller
- [53:28]
E
thing
- [53:31]
C
and completely unlikely to grow into an all embracing political system that would rule out war. And so I, and I think that prospect in itself just doesn't bother Donald Trump. It bothers a lot of other people. But you know, and I, and I would say, by the way, the Japanese have, I don't know what absence of mind caused them to get a nuclear energy program that built in the, the waste is weapons grade plutonium. I just, you know, obviously an odd oversight that they, well, what a mistake that was, right? And so, I mean, it's, for many, many years it's been a question, it's been a very short period of time that Japan would need to go nuclear. And I think it's, the political resistance is strong. But I would say for the last 15 years, I've heard more and more people in Japanese politics talking about, well, new era may someday come and Korea, I think you have something you had even before Trump, very high popular majorities in favor of South Korea developing nuclear weapons. Because of my guess, by the way, on German French conversations about this, I do not think a chancellor of Germany will ever agree to switch an American nuclear umbrella for a French nuclear umbrella. But having this conversation is possibly a way of beginning the very difficult and delicate task of developing a German nuclear
- [55:13]
B
umbrella which will scare the Bee Gees out of everybody. Right.
- [55:18]
C
Well, Tom Lehrer had that great song. He was a Harvard. If you haven't heard the songs of Tom Lehrer, you should go back. He was a Harvard mathematics professor from the 60s who. Who wrote these great kind of satirical political songs. One of them was once all the Germans were warlike and mean, but that couldn't happen again. We taught them a lesson in 1918, and they've hardly bothered us since then. So. And that was actually written about a plan to give the Germans a share in the NATO nuclear defense thing. So these suspicions are deep and real that different countries and cultures have of each other. I think if you're in the Middle east, you are looking hard for ways to get a bomb. I think the Saudi support, you know, the Saudi Pakistani defense agreement is a way of kind of a backdoor way of moving in this direction without incurring some of the problems. And I would say this is. Trump is an accelerant. He's making things happen faster than they would have happened without him. But I don't think he's a prime. He's the prime cause. And I think the world was kind of drifting in this direction. And sooner or later, again, if we look at the polling in Europe, I think reform is number one in the polls here in the UK the National Front in France, the AfD in Germany, and obviously in Italy, they're in government. You know, things are moving for reasons that, you know, Donald Trump is. Is a very conspicuous, large element in this flow, but it is not. Not confined to him.
- [57:08]
B
Yeah.
- [57:09]
C
And we're in an era of, I think, more nationalist politics everywhere, or almost everywhere. And as that happens, questions like nuclear weapons do tend to come to the fore.
- [57:23]
B
Okay. Before we turn over, you know, I open it up to questions. Let's talk about the post Trump world and move things forward. Let's say it's 2028 and Trump does not try to hold on to the presidency. J.D. vance is the Republican candidate, but he gets his head handed to him in the election. It's a Democratic landslide. So the landslide part of this is important. It's a Plausible scenario, I think. What parts of Trump's foreign policy stick that the Democrat, whoever it is, feels either on the basis of merit or just political. The kind of. It's too heavy a lift to change it politically. What sticks and what goes by the boards.
- [58:25]
C
I think some of the fastest things that won't stick will be a return to certain UN organizations and sort of symbolic statements that don't necessarily have a lot of practical influence. So the US Back in, UNESCO, World Health Organization, stuff like that. If the, if we still. If the Paris Accords are still around in 2028 signing, you know, we're a little bit with the Paris Accords like the British were with the European Union. In, out, in, out. So we'd probably come back in. You know, would they set up. You re. Re. Establish usaid? That would be maybe a slightly heavier lift because foreign aid isn't all that popular.
- [59:13]
B
What about tariffs?
- [59:16]
C
I think we would shift in. I don't. I mean, Biden didn't get rid of a lot of Trump's tariffs. Right now. There are a lot. Trump has a lot more tariffs on the ground. But I think. I think the Democrats will need revenue, and tariffs produce revenue for the government you're gonna have. If you're a Democratic president coming in, you've got a lot of. You've gotten elected in part because you said this terrible austerity. We have to do more social spending. We have to really help people. That money has to come from somewhere. And given what's been going on with the debt and all of this, there's going to be a much tighter link between deficit spending and interest rates than you would like. So you're going to see that revenue you might try to switch it to. We'll introduce tariffs on things that rich people buy. German cars, for example, things like that. But I think also the tariffs against China are likely to stand. So I would say a mixed picture. I would not look for a wholesale dismantling of the tariff regime again, particularly because it's likely the Supreme Court is going to rule many of Trump's current tariffs unconstitutional, at least. I mean, believe me, I am no constitutional lawyer, but I know people who know constitutional lawyers, and they tell me that the court is likely to rule them unconstitutional. So the actual tariffs that will exist in 2028 are a little different from what we have now.
- [60:59]
B
Court might speak tomorrow on this. Let's open it up to questions. I will take. Let me just see where all the hands are. How about that gentleman in a sweater that's got like blue. Light blue. Dark blue. Yeah. And I'll. And I'll come to the woman with the cast next. You just have to hand it over to her. Yeah.
- [61:32]
C
Thank you.
- [61:33]
F
Professor Mead, my name is Atman Vakil and I'm a graduate student here in economics. We've actually met a couple Times in Washington, D.C. so it's very good to see you again. My question was actually flipping the script. So if you are one of those countries who is in a trade dispute or any defense dispute with Donald Trump, what is your optimal response? Do you stare down the tiger? Do you acquiesce, or do you just say that? Well, I've got other options if we are going down this route. Thank you.
- [62:00]
B
Can you hand it to your left? There you go.
- [62:04]
G
Thank you. I was just wondering, on tackling Trump, who are you? Oh, my name's Tyler Grace. I'm a sixth form student. Okay. How do we balance taking what Trump says specifically about foreign policy with a pinch of salt? Because. Well, as you've mentioned, a lot of what he says and does is for reactionary purposes, but while also not downplaying the weight of his friends, especially what we've seen occur in Venezuela. All right, thank you.
- [62:31]
B
Okay. And then online, Chris, right down here in the front. Can you bring a mic to Chris? Oh, you've got both of them. Okay.
- [62:40]
C
Yeah.
- [62:44]
B
Great.
- [62:46]
D
So just to say we have over 400 people watching tonight across the online platform from countries including Canada, China, Mexico, Peru, Indonesia, South Africa, India, Poland, Italy, Germany, Ghana, and the U.S. our first question from online comes from Peter Anders, who asks, how should European leaders plan for such an unpredictable world? Are they wasting their time trying?
- [63:07]
C
Okay, good questions. Options in dealing with Trump. I mean, your tiger analogy is not necessarily a bad one. And I would say, you know, when faced with a tiger, like, how big is the tiger? How angry is the tiger? How close is a tree? Is the tiger good at climbing trees? You know, you have to assess in the specific, concrete situation. You know, what are your strengths and weaknesses for bargaining? What are his? I would say you always. And you would do this in any bargaining situation, try to think of something that you have that he cares about more than you do so that you can develop an offer that is attractive to him but not unattractive to you. And obviously, things that he has that he doesn't care very much about that that you might be able to exchange. So I would say, you know, enter a bargaining mentality and be coldly realistic about your actual position and creative about your responses on how do we Tell what to take seriously and what not to take seriously in general, the things that he keeps coming back to matter more. I think it was interesting in the case of Venezuela. Venezuela was, was a place where you looked at what he was saying about Venezuela. He was talking really about three things. Number one, the economic policies had left something like driven something like a quarter of the population. I don't know the exact number, but a very large percentage of the population into exile as refugees. That hits Trump on his immigration side a lot. Then it is Venezuela, the drug cartels had infiltrated the government. Again, that's one of his big domestic issues is drug cartels and how do we deal with them. And then Venezuela was being very friendly to Russia and China and Iran and allowing all kinds of things to go on that again would annoy people in the United States who support Trump. So Venezuela, you can see why it's an attractive target for Trump and the kind of thing he's much, you know, he's much less likely to bomb China than he is to go into Venezuela. So I would say again, you know, look at the realities of the situation, try to understand the political structure of his support to the extent that you can, the preferences that he exhibits frequently in his thinking. And then out of this you're able to get probabilities, not certainties, but probabilities.
- [66:01]
B
Maybe just on this as a follow up. I mean, so how do you, what kind of weight do you attach to the nss, for example, the national security strategies?
- [66:11]
C
Oh, very little.
- [66:11]
B
Right. So he doesn't read it for sure.
- [66:13]
C
Right. I mean, I think, look, this is always when an American government, American administration has a crisis. I don't know if there's a single case in history of somebody, a policymaker saying, oh wait, I Remember on page 17 of the National Security strategy statement, there's the answer. Let's go back. Was actually telling the story to a Chinese diplomat, you know, saying, and saying, you know, don't, don't read too much into these national security strategies. And she said, actually said, but you know, we're the opposite, that in China you would go back to the strategy statement. So they're very different documents with very different implications.
- [66:54]
B
Okay.
- [66:55]
C
Oh, and then the European question, I see the Europeans really have some tough issues. They're not all Trump imposed. But again, the European Union was built for a slower pace of international relations and of economic change. That in the nature a 27 member union is going to have a very complex, slow decision making process. And you know, not just in respect to Trump. But over and over again, by the time the EU has figured out what its policy should be, the kind of problem has moved on and the solutions are lag behind the problem. So, you know, this is. I mean, this is. Trump makes this problem worse and more immediate for Europe. But it is something that if Donald Trump had never been born, the European Union would find itself disadvantaged in the contemporary political world because as the pace of change accelerates, European decision making has not found a way to accelerate in return.
- [68:03]
B
Mary.
- [68:06]
H
Well, thanks for a very fascinating analysis, but what struck me was that you didn't use any of the words that people usually use, like oligarchy or transactionalism. And I just wonder where you think. I mean, to what extent is Trump interested, both personally and in making money out of the presidency? And in US Terms, I mean, one of the things, I follow Ukraine very closely. One of the things that struck me in the US Proposal for peace was that most detailed clause was about how to share out the Russian seized assets. And then he has all this stuff about mineral deals and so on. So where do all these economic issues.
- [68:56]
B
Profits.
- [68:57]
C
Right. I think, look, I think you've got two questions embodied there, a general one about Trump's interest in, let's say, doing well, doing well by doing good, that he would like. I think he. He feels that he is. His services are of such immense value to suffering humanity in the United States that they really ought to be well compensated, and not only to him, but to those who he cares about. You know, for my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law, I think that's. I don't think you have to look hard to see this, but on the specific thing of the Ukraine deals, I don't actually think he expects what comes out in Ukraine. Oh, now we're going to enact clause 17B of the draft proposal. To some degree, these are just exercises. Part of Trump's statecraft is there are a lot of problems in the world that you can't solve, or at least can't solve fast. What do you do with them? Think about the North Korea thing. In his first term, it's like North Korea has this nuclear program. It's getting bigger and more dangerous all the time, and it's really bad and it's ugly. It's like, you know, your cat has puked on the dinner table, and you can't, you know, you have, like. And there it is. Right. And Trump, Trump's approach with these problems, he knows he can't clean it up. Right. But you put a pretty box around it, you know, you put it in a box with a ribbon. So in Gaza, we're talking. We're not talking about, you know, the war, we're talking about will the Trump plan. What are the details of the Trump plan to revive Gaza? Will the Europeans sit on the board of peace? Okay. We're talking about the box and the ribbons, not about what the cat just did. And I think he does that a lot. And I think that's a lot of these peace proposals that's in there. Not that when it comes time to something that will stick, that he won't try to get. Stick his oar in, in some way.
- [71:14]
B
Okay, we got a lot of hands up here. Let's take the gentleman in the black jersey right there. Yeah.
- [71:26]
I
Thank you very much, Walter. Very interesting. I am just wondering to expand on what happens after the Trump administration, just because, as you say, statecraft and studying history as an important factor. And we look at Napoleon, Napoleon had a Wellington on the opposite side. Right. And you had the British Empire, which was great by then in strength and military effort. If we look at, say Hitler, you had like the Western coalition, including the US and the US Became a superpower because of the Second World War as well, militarily speaking. But now we are in the phase where the US Is potentially in a foreign policy that is affecting what it means to have a due process. A due process in I guess, Ukraine, Gaza, Venezuela as well. I am Venezuelan, so I actually welcome the fact that the person named president is no longer there, but at the same time, he's breaking everything that we know institutionally. So what happens after the Trump administration where we have all this track of things happening and maybe as a self help thing, what do we do as individuals where we have access as well to do things as well from our social media standpoint, what do we share? What do we.
- [72:48]
B
Don't hold that thought. All the way back in the blue.
- [73:01]
F
Thanks, Walter, for the lovely presentation.
- [73:04]
C
Can you hear me now?
- [73:05]
B
We can.
- [73:06]
F
Thanks, Walter, for the lovely presentation.
- [73:09]
C
What do you think is going to be the trajectory of the so called Thucydides trap after Trump's storm of the.
- [73:15]
B
Of the what?
- [73:16]
C
Thucy Didi's trap. Of Thucydides trap. I'm sorry. Yes.
- [73:21]
I
Okay.
- [73:22]
C
I was unaccustomed. I was not. My ear was not attuned to getting a classical reference.
- [73:28]
B
Chris, I'll come back.
- [73:37]
D
Thank you. This is an online question from Adrian Magnus. Could you comment on the US Iran negotiations and what Trump's objectives may be?
- [73:44]
B
Thank you
- [73:47]
C
on that.
- [73:47]
B
Trump announced just a couple hours ago, I think that make a decision within 10 days. I think the last time he said that, he bombed within the ten days.
- [74:00]
C
Right, yeah. Well, he may make a decision in 10 days that he needs another 10 days for the decision. My last column in the Journal was saying that the worst thing for Trump about the Iran crisis is that it has to end one way or another. That actually kind of works for him in a number of ways. All right, so first question after Trump. What do we do as individuals and societies? Say we should not place too much weight on the difference between Trump era and post Trump era, because Trump, again, is a manifestation of profound changes in the way our societies work, the way the world economy works, and the way world cultures are working. And those changes are going to continue and even accelerate whether he is in charge or not. And the whole question about how do we as individuals make ourselves politically heard and politically effective in an age of social media is a question that really nobody has the answers to. I suppose Tucker Carlson thinks he's got an answer, and there's some other influencers out there who've managed to create a certain type of power by using the media. But it does raise profound questions about democracy. One of the aspects of this, of the Eye in the storm, the 1945-2015 era, when sort of Western conventional wisdom thought that things were settled and moving forward right, in a predictable nice way, was that the assumption was that the modern democratic state, with its apparatus of parties and forms of representation, was the final form of human governance and that we weren't going to be rethinking any of our basic institutions. I see many people in this room who live in a generation where a lot of those questions may well come up for grabs. I'll just say one thing about it, which is democracy is one thing in a very small country or a country with a very small population, where you and your friends getting together can actually have an impact on state policy. But if we hypothetically imagine a world with a population of 8 billion people in it, and each person has an equal share of determining the governance of the world, what it is is that no one effectively will have any share as an individual because there will be this immense weight of a majority that you can do nothing about. And so democracy sort of projected to that global level reaches a point of meaninglessness in. In terms of an individual's ability to shape their own destiny or to shape social destiny. And we are going to, you know, and so I think we have to think about in Some cases rethink, in some cases renew our old views of what works and what doesn't work. But it's not a small question that you're asking and President Trump's. The end of President Trump's term in office won't end the need to ask these questions. On the Thucydides trap. It was here before Donald Trump. It will be here when Donald Trump is gone. And myself, actually, I was a little bit skeptical. I've had the misfortune of reading Thucydides more than once, and as a kid, significant amount of it in Greek. And let me tell you, that is really bad. That man's vocabulary is just dreadful in terms of a poor kid having to translate it. I think it's child abuse. But one of the things that's missing, I think, from this Thucydides trap is that the Thucydides analogy that Xi Jinping made was that it wasn't actually the Spartans, left to themselves, would not have actually gone to war with Athens, even though they were afraid of Athenian power. It's only when the Corinthians come in and say, if you don't back us, your only ally, then Athens is really going to be a problem. And it was the Corinthians that turned the vote for war in the Spartan assembly. And I would say, if I were China, I would think really hard about the way your policies are driving Japan. If the Thucydides trap is something that you want to avoid, then US, Iran negotiations, what does Trump want from them? Well, he wants drama. He wants excitement. He wants the whole world looking at him with awe and curiosity and fear and hope, which he's got in that sense. He's got right now what he wants from the Iran crisis to a certain degree. Now, what he doesn't want is for would be for that to turn into, like, either a horrible war or an embarrassing climb down where it looks like the mullahs stared him down. Neither of those things does he want. So he would rather prolong the crisis than go into either of those or maybe just let it gradually die down and go off and invade Greenland or something so that people don't think about it as much. But I think he would, you know, I think what he would settle for and settle for happily would be some kind of a deal that he can point to, like three clear points where this is better than the deal that, that Obama got with the jcpoa. That's probably his bottom line. And I think the Iranians have to think hard about whether or not that's something they're ready to do.
- [80:29]
B
We'll take the hand in the very back. That's you. Yeah.
- [80:35]
E
Wonderful. Well, my name's Julian Weiss. I'm here on loan from the American University. Actually, I've been reading you. I've been reading Tablet. I read Ark of a Covenant and I was just talking to Bill Drexel earlier today. So it's a shock. I've haunted Hudson's halls for a while, so I'm shocked I haven't met you yet. But pleasure to see you in person. My question, you're at Hudson? Actually, it somewhat relates to the Iran thing. Where do you think the right is going right now? Do you see? I mean, obviously there's just insane. I don't even know what to say about the heritage issue. There's an anti Semitism crisis. I mean, you have these institutions, A.I. hudson Institute, which were very strong, but it's sort of unclear. How are they influencing policy? What's the role of K Street in the social media age? I guess.
- [81:27]
B
Okay, so the right and then in front. Yeah, in a. I don't know, like a jacket. Green. Yeah. There we go. Thank you.
- [81:36]
J
I'm Nikhil McDonald. I studied law here a while ago. Back on Iran, but a slightly different point. I've been fascinated by the way that Trump doesn't seem to have any concept of freedom or liberty as being things or anything that's significant, even around Israel and the conflict with Hamas and so on, or Venezuela, in fact. And I wonder what, you know, even Biden, although he wasn't strong on those things, still was in a tradition where, you know, in the kind of context of the, you know, the kind of rules based global order and the kind of sense of moral duty and so on of the United States, they would at least have said that they wanted freedom for the Iranian people and they wanted liberty for the Venezuelans and so on. What's the significance of Trump not having any interest in those things? Is it something to do with American isolationism? Is it transactionalism? Is it just wanting deals? Is there something significant about this kind of moral vacuum that he seems to contain? If you can contain a vacuum, I guess you can.
- [82:42]
B
So, you know, I think we have about four minutes left. So I think we'll go with these two questions. Maybe take them in the order that they were presented. Yeah. All right.
- [82:51]
C
Whither the right big question? And honestly, I don't know. And you know, I'm not, I'm not sure I'm even qualified to say I'M hardly a movement conservative or kind of, you know, haven't sworn any oaths of allegiance or anything. I think I would say this, that in times like ours, ideologies and coalitions and alignments get regularly blown up and reassembled. And so what a lot of people think of in the United States is kind of the traditional, therefore ever right is the sort of William F. Buckley's fusionist vision, which didn't exist before William F. Buckley in the 1950s and faced a lot of opposition as it was pulling itself together. And never really, you know, Rand Paul and his father Ron Paul were never really on board with the rest of it. But the same thing is true. You know, what do liberals believe? What does the center left and the far left believe? You can certainly go back over history. You know, the Communist Party in 20th century Europe and the United States was about as socially conservative as a group of people can be. Very much against homosexuality, even against divorce and remarriage and stuff. They were as tough as the Catholic Church on some of these things, or tougher because the Catholic Church just looks at you unhappily and the communists would do other things. So, you know, what is the left and what is the right always are changing. And it's just an illusion that what you see right now is some kind of permanent configuration. I think I can. This gets us into a whole nother subject. So I won't just slightly show you the interior of the can of worms. And that is the collapse of the industrial proletariat as a factor in history. Significant factor in history is creating all kinds of changes in Western society and will continue to have changes. It helps me to move to identity politics. It means that self identified left intellectuals no longer have the sort of discipline of an organized working man's party that they kind of align with. And so you get a lot kind of weirder and more flowery forms of left ideology happening. A lot of things are going on and they're gonna go on in the American right as well as the American left. And then finally, what was that last question? I wrote it down. So I should a. Liberty. Yeah, Trump and democracy. You're correct that for Trump, democracy is not a big deal. Liberty is not a big deal. Freedom is especially, I would say, as an element of foreign policy. He just. And I think he would say, in this more dangerous world, you can't do everything. And this is something we're just not going to do. Is that a good idea? Is it a bad idea? I know if I look back At American history. What I see is interesting. Think of Nixon and Kissinger coming into power in 69. You've got a war in Vietnam that they don't know how to win that is ripping the country apart. You've got the trade deficit, balance of payments rapidly eroding. The Bretton woods fixed currency system. They're not going to be able to keep it up. There are a whole list of other things. You know, what do they do? They come in and they basically, they make a deal with Mao's China at the height of the Cultural Revolution, the greatest monster of the 20th century and possibly ever in terms of the number of innocent people killed because of his edicts. And you know, they, and so utter against the Soviet Union which at that time is just kind of a boring, bad, ugly authoritarian thing. But nothing like the flaming totalitarianism insanity of Mao's China.
- [87:19]
B
China,
- [87:21]
C
utterly cynical. They sell the South Koreans to the North, South Vietnamese to the North Vietnamese. They break solemn American promises to every bondholder and debt holder in the world by taking the dollar off the gold standard. You know, just a whole. They impose 10% tariffs globally. They give Japan three months, what, three hours notice that they're going to change their China policy. They align with Pakistan against India in that horrible war. All of those things they do. They're hailed at the time in America at least as great geniuses of foreign policy. Kissinger was a rock star. Well, within a few years, you know, the, the American position in the world had gotten a lot better. The Vietnam war was over. The Vietnam syndrome was beginning to fade. The transition to post Bretton woods, et cetera was getting better. And you know, things are starting to look up. And what do you see at that point in America, both on the left and the right? You see the previous awe of Kissinger's diplomacy turn into this loathing like where is the morality? Where is the values? On the right this was why isn't there a principled anti communism? And on the left it's why don't they put human rights and democracy at the center? All right? And then, you know, Carter does it somewhat ineffectively. But in Reagan's years you actually have the U. S doing some things on human rights, whether it's Marcos in the Philippines or South Africa, some other things that are quite different from what it had done in the past. One of my readings from this is a lot of us get it wrong that, that we think that if you are nice and moral and good all the time, this is what will build your power. And I Think, actually, it may be not 100% the other way around, but it's this. If you fail at the basics of your foreign policy and of social construction, you will not be able to do any nice things. In fact, you'll have to do a bunch of pretty ratty things to climb out of the hole that you're in. And so I think that we actually need. Now, I'm not comparing Trump and Kissinger here in terms of all kinds of ways. I knew Henry, he would blast me from the great beyond. But what I am saying is this, that if we actually want to build in these chaotic times a world in which individuals can flourish, where there can be more justice in the world, I don't think we'll ever get to a fully just world. I think that's beyond us, but where it's better, where countries are less cynical in their dealings with others and so on. We have to get the fundamentals of power right first. People sometimes talk about that, you know, that. That the iron fist needs a velvet glove. It's a lot better. An iron fist is a lot better when it has a velvet glove. But here's this. A velvet glove without an iron fist is just an empty. It's just a worthless rag. An iron fist without a velvet glove can still do some things. And so we have. I honestly believe it is our moral duty to attend to the pragmatic, necessary foundations of power to have any prayer of making a better world. No one would have been interested in Eleanor Roosevelt's ideas about a universal declaration of human rights if the Allies hadn't won the Second World War.
- [91:30]
B
We're going to leave it right there, Walter.
- [91:32]
C
Thank you so much,
- [91:52]
B
Sam.